Yoyo
by hjea
Summary: Buffy discovers the yoyo. Takes place after Showtime.


Note: I recently got a yo-yo from my dad. Not for any particular reason, and it's a fairly odd gift for a teenage girl, but I've been enjoying it and trying to actually get it working for me nonetheless. You can probably guess that I'm pretty bad. I had been half surfing the net, half playing with the aggravating thing one this story kind of appeared. I've almost never written in first person, present tense even less, so it was pretty unusual for me to discover I was writing that way. But I did anyway, and here is the fruit of my labour. I'll stop blabbing now and let you get on with reading, if you actually bothered to read this bit. Hope you enjoy! Lilyhead.  
  
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This is driving me crazy. I know that it's important to protect these girls, and it's important to have everybody in the house to be safe from the First Evil. But, my god, having thirteen people living in a three bedroom house with only one bathroom is enough to send any person, even a slayer with a mission to save the world (yet again) absolutely stark raving mad. Oh, and let's not forget the vampire chained up in my basement who is my utter responsibility because no one else will go near him.  
  
Xander, Dawn and three of the Potentials have gotten into a fight about scrabble rules in the living room, Willow, Kennedy, Molly and Anya are eating in the kitchen, though it's more complaining about the lack of food, or clean sheets or toilet paper or anything. I have no idea where anyone else is, and frankly, I could care less. I have to get away from it all, if only for a little while.  
  
Running up the stairs, I head towards the bathroom and start to open the door before I hear a muffled protest and the splash of water. "God, Andrew are you having a bath again?" There's a pause, where more water is splashed around. "Uh...no." "If you don't get out as fast as possible I'll...do I have to remind you that Spike is in the basement, as you soon will be too." I immediately hear the drain start going, but I walk away, it's not worth the wait.  
  
Idly walking down the hall, I turn into Dawn's room, not really with a purpose just for something to do. The room is absolutely riddled with teenage girl paraphernalia, along with a few stakes and an axe propped against the wall. Poor Dawnie, she's never had to share her room in her life and now she's got two, no three, strangers bunking with her. I start to put a couple of things away, knowing I'm turning into my mother, but proceeding nonetheless.  
  
In one of the corners a yo-yo, probably Molly's, is lying abandoned on the floor. I pick it up casually, and just look at it for a moment. Standard wooden yo-yo, no automatic wind-up like the ones I played with when I was little. Without really realizing it, I slip my finger through the string loop and let the toy drop down; I heard once they were supposed to come back up. Ruefully I pick it up and start to wind the string around its middle. Jeez, even that's hard.  
  
I finally get the string back around and drop the yo-yo again, this time flicking my wrist a bit more. The yo-yo comes back up this time, but drops again and sways listlessly through the air. Here I am, slayer who can use pretty much every weapon ever made, being stumped by this stupid toy. It must be different muscles.  
  
I give it another go, and it goes up and down, up and down, before spiraling out my control. I wind it up and repeat the process. Up down, up down, lose control, wind up, and repeat. This goes on for awhile, and the motion is comforting, especially as I slowly improve. I don't have to think about it, I just do.  
  
As I stand here playing with this toy, it suddenly dawns on me that my life isn't unlike this yo-yo's motion. I go up and down, have my good times and my bad, but it's steady. Until something happens with no warning. The motion becomes jerky, and it's not just up and down anymore. It goes sideways, and the ups are reluctant and not as high, the lows longer and determined.  
  
And suddenly it's there, spiraling with no direction, no control; chaos reigns. I'm just spinning, and there's no way to come back out of it, no way to get back up again.  
  
I notice my yo-yo has stopped going and I slowly grab hold of the small wooden circle and wind the string, around and around until it's ready to go. In the past, when I had stopped going, someone was always there to set me right, to wind me back up again. Whether it was Mom, or Giles, my friends, even Spike, I'd rely on them to make it all better, to make me better. I didn't realize that this was slowly destroying me, wearing at my string and making me weak. Giles was the first to notice and he tried to warn me. But I couldn't listen, and he left.  
  
There I was, again at the end of my rope, with no one to wind me up. Giles was gone, Willow was submerged in her own chaos and Dawn was neglected herself. So I stayed down there, occasionally being wound halfway by Spike, before tumbling down again. It was easy, I didn't have to do any work, I just swayed and spun.  
  
You can't stay down there forever though, or you cease to be. A yo-yo left dangling eventually stops being a yo-yo and becomes a ball at the end of a string: it is made to come back up. It took my best friend nearly destroying everything ever dear to her for me to realize that. I was so absorbed in just being at the bottom that I couldn't see far up enough to notice the people around me, people I love and care about wildly spinning out of control as well. Just as suddenly as I realized it, I knew what I had to do.  
  
I began to wind myself up.  
  
It was slow and hard, sometimes it still is, but I learned to do it and gained confidence as I did. Relying on others is easy and sometimes it's the only thing you can do, but in the long run it just slows you down, makes you jerky and unreliable. I'm going up and down now, steadily and surely. Sometimes there're rough patches, but there they'll always be there, and I know that if I drop off the deep end, I can get myself back up.  
  
I drop the yo-yo into the air one last time and make it go up and down, up and down. I roll it out in front of me, snap it back, let it trail along the ground before curling my wrist in and catching it in my palm. And suddenly I'm laughing! It's fun and exciting and new! I'm a little unconfident about it, I don't really know if it's going to do what I want it too, but I'm lost in the utter simplistic joy of it, the freedom of it's movement, and I don't care.  
  
The yo-yo is then resting in my open palm, string wound tight, perfectly ready to be enjoyed. Slipping it of my finger, I set it beside an old teddy bear (it may be Dawn's, maybe not) sitting on the shelf, in plain view of anyone who would venture to try it.  
  
It's unpredictable: yo-yo, life, whatever; and can take a turn of it's own just when you think you've got it under control. Once upon a time I couldn't deal, but that's over. I probably won't live happily ever after, but I'll live, and that's what's important. I can take the ups and down, the spinning chaos and the listless suspension because I now know, for the most part, what to do.  
  
And I'm not scared. 


End file.
